Local History: Nellie MacMillan Writes Home, 1914

            On December 18, 1914, Nellie MacMillan wrote home.

            Mrs. McMillan had been born Helen Artie Tarleton Belles in the year 1856 in Indianapolis, Indiana to Dr. Joshua Tarleton Belles and his wife, Julia Reid Belles. Her mother died when Nellie was almost five after delivering four more children, all stillborn. Dr. Belles and his daughter then moved to Spencer, Indiana where Nellie lived until she was sent to the Henrietta Colgan School in Indianapolis to learn fine manners and social graces.

            While there, she met John Bayless “Jack” Hill, the son of a prominent Indianapolis family. They bonded over a shared love of music and artistic sensibilities and on June 30, 1874 the pair married in Spencer. Jack died five months later.

            At loose ends, the young widow persuaded her father to send her to Europe to study voice. He agreed and Nellie, who is said to have had a beautiful contralto voice, went to Europe where she studied and performed in France, Italy, and England. It was in Paris where she met Maurice Crawford MacMillian; whose father Daniel had co-founded MacMillan Publishing in 1843. The couple married in 1884. Although Maurice MacMillan has been described as “retiring” and “distant,” he was an amateur musician and he sang a duet with his bride at their wedding reception. Nellie and Maurice MacMillan went on to produce three sons; Daniel, Arthur, and Harold. Her son Harold would later remark that it was one of the great regrets of his life that he never heard his mother sing, as she had curiously “lost her voice” after the birth of her first child.

            Nellie MacMillan would sometimes return home to visit Spencer, once bringing her husband Maurice, but just before Christmas, 1914, she down in her home at Birch Grove House in West Sussex, England and wrote a letter to Mrs. Ella Belles of Indianapolis who forwarded it to the Owen Leader for publication.  England had declared war on Germany in August of that year and the United States for more than two year away from entering the fray when Mrs. MacMillan wrote:

“I hope you are all well and will have a pleasant Christmas together. This will be a sad time for everyone here for there is not a family that has not lost relations or friends in this war. Dan and Harold are in the New Army but will not go out until spring. Arthur has always had a weak heart and they will not take him. He is very unhappy not to be in training with his brothers. Never has anything been finer than the ardour of all the young men, of all classes. If only England had listened to Lord Robert’s warnings, she would not be in such an unprecedented state. However the nation is rising splendidly to meet the demands of it and complete harmony and unity exists. All classes are brought together in a wonderful way. There are no such things now as party politics and differences in religion, of class: all are Britons; even the poorest is willing to give the best he has and the whole Empire has given its best and much of it. This is no ordinary war but a war to crush out forever the idea that “Might is Right” and the idea that all nations great and small, would do better under the Iron Rule of Prussia with her “Kultur” rammed down the throats of all of us, and every man and every boy, every penny in the Empire will be given before this is allowed. I only wish I had 20 sons to give to such a cause.

“We have had a very wet winter. In France it is very wet too, and life in the trenches is very hard but there are no complaints and never were soldiers more cheerful and unselfish.”

            The Lord Roberts Nellie MacMillan was referencing in her letter was Lord Frederick Roberts, born in India in 1832, the son of a British General. After being educated at Eton, Sandhurst, and the Addiscombe Military Academy, he first saw combat as a mercenary for the East India Company during the Indian Rebellion of 1857, or, as it is known in India, The First War of Independence. He then transferred to the British Army where he took part in the Abyssinian Campaigns against the Emperor of Ethiopia, Tewadros II. He then served in the Afghan War of 1878, and was appointed commander of Kabul and Kandahar after the prior commander, Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari, was killed by mutinous Afghan soldiers. After his rousing success in Afghanistan, Roberts was sent to South Africa to take part in the Second Anglo-Boer War. This living tattoo of Empire returned to England in 1902 where he founded the “Pilgrim’s Society” made up of influential politicians, businessmen, diplomats and writers with a goal to “promote good-will, good-fellowship, and everlasting peace between the United States and Great Britain,” and; to this day, under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth II, hosts dinners to welcome each new U.S. Ambassador to Britain to their ranks. He also became, in 1905, the head of National Service League which lobbied for compulsory military training for every British male between the ages of 18 and 30 and which called for universal conscription in preparation for a “Great European War.”

            Nellie’s son Harold was wounded at the Battle of Loos in September, 1915, and then “lightly wounded” at Ypres salient on July 19, 1916. Then in September, 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, he was seriously wounded when he was shot through the left thigh and pelvis. Crawling into a trench, McMillan lay there for three days, intermittently reading from a pocket edition of the Greek tragedian Aeschylus’s play, Prometheus Bound, a work McMillan found to be, “not inappropriate to my position.” He was rescued by a Company Sergeant but his wounds became badly infected and he believed that it was only the actions of his mother, who did an end-run around military protocol to get him additional medical treatment, that his life was saved.

            “I owe everything to my mother,” Harold MacMillan stated.

            His wife, the Lady Dorothy Evelyn Cavendish, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, seemed to have a differing opinion. Dorothy and Harold were married in 1920 and went to live at Birch House with Maurice and Nellie. It was there Dorothy’s children saw her sticking pins into a wax Voodoo doll of Nellie.

            Over 700,000 British soldiers sacrificed their lives in World War I. Out of the 26 freshmen in MacMillan’s class at Balliol College, Oxford, only two of them survived the war. Harold MacMillan was awarded the British War Medal and the Allied Victory Medal and the aftermath of his wounds would plague him for the rest of his life. After the War, McMillan went into politics and publishing, becoming an outspoken critic of appeasement and joining Winston Churchill’s War Cabinet. In 1957 he was appointed Prime Minister of Great Britain after the resignation of Anthony Eden. He served in this capacity until 1963, a year which saw both the Vassall and Profumo scandals. When asked what his biggest challenge as a states man had been, MacMillan replied, “Events, my dear boy. Events.”

            Harold MacMillan made a “sentimental journey” to Spencer in 1956. He attended services at the Methodist Church where his mother once sang and laid a wreath on the grave of his maternal grandfather, Joshua Belles, at Riverside Cemetery. After a barbeque feast at McCormick’s Creek State Park, local residents presented the future Prime Minister with a jar of Paw-Paws, the “Indiana Banana.” Harold MacMillan would make three more trips to Spencer, twice accompanied by his grandson, Alexander, who came back on his own as the Earl of Stockton in 1994 but that’s the last we’ve seen of the MacMillans since.

            Nelly MacMillan died in 1937 at the age of 84 and is buried in Sussex. Four years before her death she became instrumental in the publication of Margaret Mitchell’s only book, Gone With the Wind. Nellie had plucked the novel from a slush pile in her husband’s home office and, after reading it, insisted that MacMillan Publishers buy all the international rights to it.

            On Thursday, May 5, 2011, Claude Stanley Choules, the last living combat veteran of World War I, died at the age of 110 in a nursing home in Western Australia. Mr. Choules was born in Great Britain in 1901. At the age of 14 he joined the Royal Navy and in 1918 he witnessed the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet from the deck of the HMS Revenge. Mr. Choules later settled in Australia, transferring to the Royal Australian Navy, where he served during World War II.  Later in life he became an outspoken pacifist, refusing to participate in annual commemoration parades and boycotting Australia’s Anzac Day.

            The last American Doughboy, Frank Buckles, died earlier in 2011 on February 27^th in West Virginia. He was also 110 years old. He had lied about his age so he could join the fight at 16. He was sent to Europe where he drove an ambulance on the Western Front. After the War, in 1941, while working as a steamship company as a purser in the Philippines, he was captured by Japanese troops and held prisoner for more than three years.   

            The only person in the world left who served in WWII is Florence Beatrice Patterson Green of King’s Lynn, Norfolk, England. Miss Patterson joined the Women’s Royal Air Force in September, 1918 when she was 17. Her service is usually described as that of “waitress” though her official title was Officer’s Mess Steward. Ms. Patterson-Green turned 110 on February 19^th, 2011. We wish her Godspeed.

~ Laura Wilkerson
   Genealogy Department, OCPL